News and features related to historical or contemporary topics written about in my novels.

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  The mythical female pope is back in the news as an academic uses medieval coins to look for physical evidence of her reign In the late Middle Ages, a popular legend advanced the story of a medieval woman who disguised herself in men’s clothing and ascended to the role …

There may be an undiscovered Earth-like planet lurking within the solar system, according to a team of astronomers looking at the movement of objects in the Kuiper Belt.  Finding planets is no simple task, now that we’ve found the ones like Jupiter which were helpful enough to be fairly visible …

  For nearly a century, the University of Michigan possessed a piece of paper that it considered “one of the jewels” of its library. Believed to have been written in 1609 and 1610 by astronomer and physicist Galileo Galilei, it features a letter signed by the scientist describing a new …

From The Atlantic, February 23, 2023 At the small elementary school in Jouy-sous-les-Côtes, in northeastern France, Gisèle Marc knew the rumor about her: that her parents were not her real parents, and her real mother must have been a whore. It was the late 1940s, just after the war, a …

Two sarcophaguses unearthed in reconstruction work after 2019 fire identified as elite canon of cathedral and young cavalier Two lead sarcophaguses discovered buried under the nave at Notre Dame Cathedral in what was described as an “extraordinary and emotional” find have begun giving up their secrets, French scientists announced on …

Authors’ Note:  While expressing delight with the novel, many readers of The Avignon Affair believed the fictional premise—of overthrowing a modern-day government in favor of a monarchy—could never happen. And yet again, as with so many other Fact Meets Fiction exemplars, life imitates art. Twenty-five people have been arrested in …